Book sale insiders reveal dust jacket treasures

Every day is Christmas for the volunteers sorting donations to the annual Times Colonist book sale. Open a box, they never know what might be inside.

Sometimes an old love letter, $2 bill or pressed flower will slip out of a dust jacket. Sometimes the box will hold a bigger, weirder surprise.

Among the nuggets mined in the past week are a cigar box full of collector pins, an original Mulroney-era Raeside cartoon and a series of autographed,Choose from the largest selection of plasticmoulds in the world. mounted photos of yesterdays TV stars: Susan Lucci, Piper Laurie, Patty Duke, Mulder and Scully from the X-Files.

Yes, there were jump boots, size 12 from the looks of them. A Playboy bunny logo was mounted on the brass knuckles, which must have left some interesting scars. No passports, marijuana or urns of cat ashes this year, though.

The FBI fingerprint kit came in a hard plastic container sealed within a clear evidence bag. We hoped/ feared that the container would hold a severed hand, but when Sgt. Mike Yeager of the Victoria police forensics section cracked it open he found a brand-new brush, powder and lifting tapes,We've had a lot of people asking where we had our parkingassistsystem made. along with a how-to instructional DVD your basic G-man field kit. Maybe it belonged to Mulder and Scully.

Sometimes the unboxed items are personal in nature, making you wonder if someone, somewhere wants them back. Nicco Collins, wherever you are, we have photos of every team rugby, soccer, hockey, tennis, football for which you ever played as a kid.

Victorias Karen McLeod has been holding on to one such gem for years,If we don't carry the bobblehead you want we can make a streetlight for you! hoping to return it to its rightful home. Its a handmade Fathers Day card that fell out of a book she cant remember which one that she bought at the TC sale maybe a decade ago.

What makes this card so compelling is the earnestness of its author, who might have loved his father, but was absolutely passionate about his desire to play hockey. Judging from the names printed in a laboured boyhood (or girlhood) hand, it was probably written around 1972.

The cover features a pencilled rendering of a goaltender in a No. 30 Boston Bruins sweater. (Had to be Gerry Cheevers.) Happy Fathers Day, the message begins, but after that its pretty much a heartfelt plea to pull on the blades: dear dad can i join hockey this year, I will help you with the boat and wash the car, set the breakfast table in the morning and bring in your breakfast for you on Sunday and Saturday and take empty beer bottle cases down to the basement every night you ask me to.

Hockey is the best, it continues. Join now you can be an All Star just like Bobby Orr, and Bobby Hull, Denise Hull, Gordie Howe, Tony Esposito, Phil Esposito, Ken Driden.

Having misplaced the card when moving house, McLeod recently rediscovered it in a box of old photographs. Too bad it bore no name. She hopes someone will recognize it as a missing family treasure. Its a long shot,You must not use the lanyard without being trained. I suppose, but

Anyway, youll have your own chance to unearth treasures of the printed kind at the annual two-day Times Colonist book sale this weekend. It runs 9 a.m. to 5 p.Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or howoconcretemixer .m. this Saturday and Sunday at the Victoria Curling Club at 1952 Quadra St. As usual, the money raised will go to literacy-related projects on Vancouver Island.

Incoming waves: tablets, e-books, movies online. Outgoing waves: Desktop PCs, landline phones, anything on disc, tape or paper.

Its fascinating to watch outgoing industries struggle to remain relevant. Take, for example, the outgoing wave known as pocket cameras. No wonder nobody is buying them anymore. Your phone takes pictures nearly as well and is far more convenient.

First, it emphasizes the features that a smartphone cant match, like a zoom lens. Second, it imitates the workings and design features of a smartphone. Third, it can transmit new photos to your phone for immediate sending or posting online. The result, the Canon N ($300), is half pocket camera, half photo-taking accessory for your phone.

In the category of features a phone camera lacks, the Canon N starts by offering a powerful zoom lens 8X, compared with zero X on a smartphone. Digital zoom, where the camera just enlarges a photo to make it seem as if youre closer, doesnt count.

The N also has a much bigger, more sensitive sensor and lens. Now, the Ns sensor isnt very big for a camera it measures 0.4 inches diagonally but its much better than whats in a typical phone. Finally, the Ns screen flips out 90 degrees, so you can take photos at interesting angles.

The second category, imitating a phones design and operation, is more intriguing. The Canon N is one of the weirdest-looking cameras youve ever seen. Its a nearly square, nearly featureless block, in black or white.

It has only three physical buttons, all tiny: Power, Play and Connect to Phone. As on a phone, the rest of the controls are all on the touch screen.

Now, you might have noticed that that list does not include shutter button; this camera doesnt have one. Instead, you take a picture by pressing up or down on the silver plastic ring around the lens, which budges slightly and clicks.

And what, you may ask, is the point of that design? Simple: This camera works equally well upside down or at 90 degrees. Like a phone, it detects which way youre holding it and flips the screen image accordingly. Thanks to this ring-shutter system, you can take a shot no matter how youre holding the camera.

There are other cellphone similarities. There is no external battery charger; you charge the battery in the camera, by connecting a USB cable to your computer or a wall adapter. The battery itself looks like a squared-off AA battery; its tiny. Canon says itll give you about 200 shots on a charge, which is very low.

This camera takes the same kind of memory card used on many cellphones, a microSD card, rather than the SD cards used in most cameras. Thats unfortunate, because it means you cant copy the pictures to your computer by popping out the card and inserting it into your laptop. Youll have to use the USB cable or a wireless connection.

On the side, a tiny switch moves between Automatic mode and Creative mode, which would be better named Instagram mode. When you press the shutter button sorry, shutter ring the camera takes six pictures instead of one. It applies a different filter to each one, of the sort created by the popular Instagram phone app. That is, it degrades each with various degrees of exposure adjustment, color saturation, tints and even oddball cropping. The results are never the same twice, and sometimes theyre interesting.

In Automatic mode, the camera is a basic point-and-shoot, with almost no photographic controls. With a tap on the Menu button, however, you can gain access to a Program mode that lets you make manual adjustments of exposure (brightness), white balance, ISO (light sensitivity) and so on.